The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

A vintage account of the psychedelic experience

The Joyous Cosmology is Alan Watts’s exploration of the perception that the consciousness-changing medicinal drugs LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate “when observed with sustained philosophical mirrored image through someone who's in seek, now not of kicks, yet of understanding.” greater than an artifact, it really is either a riveting memoir of Watts’s own experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions on the character of lifestyles and the life of the sacred.

Is like utilizing a huge desktop to play tick-tack-toe, and the hours of heightened conception are wasted until enthusiastic about sustained mirrored image or meditation upon no matter what issues can be instructed. the closest factor i do know in literature to the reflective use of 1 of those medications is the so-called Bead online game in Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel ). Hesse writes of a far off destiny during which an order of scholar-mystics have found an ideographic language which may relate the entire.

phantasm, wherein we seem to be assorted. The surprise of popularity. within the kind of every thing such a lot different, alien, and remote—the ever-receding galaxies, the secret of loss of life, the terrors of ailment and insanity, the foreign-feeling, gooseflesh global of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my very own insides—in a lot of these kinds i've got crept up on myself and yelled “Boo!” I scare myself out of my wits, and, whereas out of my wits, can't bear in mind simply the way it occurred. usually i'm misplaced in.

Interminable passages which we have in mind in dreams—all the streets we've ever traveled, the corridors of colleges, the winding pathways among the legs of tables and chairs the place one crawled as a baby, the tight and bloody go out from the womb, the fountainous surge in the course of the channel of the penis, the undying wanderings via ducts and spongy caverns. Down and again via ever-narrowing tubes to the purpose the place the passage itself is the traveler—a skinny string of molecules dealing with the.

worthy machine for holding an orderly society dependent upon person accountability. in reality it's a penny-wise, pound-foolish blunder that's growing many extra difficulties than it solves. To the measure that society teaches the person to spot himself with a controlling will cut loose his overall organism, it basically intensifies his feeling of separateness, from himself and from others. ultimately it aggravates the matter that it really is designed to unravel, since it creates a method.

is just to assert that using such robust medicinal drugs isn't really to be taken flippantly, as one smokes a cigarette or tosses down a cocktail. they need to be approached as one techniques a sacrament, notwithstanding no longer with the odd inhibition of gaiety and humor that has develop into known in our spiritual rituals. it's a sound basic rule that there must always be current a few certified manager to supply some extent of touch with “reality” because it is socially outlined. preferably the “qualified.